Dreamed Paths: The Films of Angela Schanelec

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German director Angela Schanelec’s films have a rhythm and tone all their own—mysterious yet moving, they unearth the metaphysics rumbling beneath the placid surface of everyday life. Her work with actors is like that of no other filmmaker, a radical approach to performance that draws on her own background in theater traditions as much as kind of Bressonian anti-naturalism. Likely the most singular and underappreciated among the contemporary German filmmakers collectively known as the Berlin School (which also includes Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, and Valeska Grisebach), Schanelec makes films that achieve nothing less than the rendering of the human soul on screen. To coincide with the February 14 opening at Film at Lincoln Center of her latest feature, I Was at Home, But… (NYFF57), a Cinema Guild release, Schanelec joins us for a complete retrospective of her astonishing and audacious body of work, plus a small selection of films picked by the filmmaker herself.